Under Arizona’s Citizens Clean Elections Act candidates who accept public funding receive grants matching dollar for dollar ( up to twice their initial grant and with adjustments ) the amounts spent on the campaign of a privately funded candidate.

The lawyer arguing against the Arizona law, William Maurer said, “…this case is about whether the government can turn my act of speaking into the vehicle by which my political opponents benefit….”

When the lawyer for Arizona’s Secretary of State, Bradley Phillips, referred to testimony that never was money withheld from a race for fear of triggering matching funds Chief Justice Roberts cut him off saying, “Oh that, there’s a back and forth about the record and common sense.  As a matter of common sense . . . if you knew that a $10,000 expenditure that you would make . . . would result in $30,000, 40,000, 50,000, depending on how many opposition candidates there were . . ., wouldn’t you think twice about it?

As the arguments were wrapping up Justice Breyer, a supporter of campaign finance reforms, said to the Justice Department lawyer, “Answer this if you wish, don’t if you don’t want to . . . as I hear this argument, what’s going through my mind is we are deeply into the details of a very complex bill.  McCain-Feingold is hundreds of pages, and we cannot possibly test each provision which is related to the others on such a test of whether it equalizes or incentivizes or some other thing, because the answer is normally we don’t know. And,” he continued, “it is better to say that it’s all illegal than to subject these things to death by a thousand cuts, because we don’t know what will happen when we start tinkering with one provision rather than another.  That thought went through my mind as I’ve heard this discussion.”

AP story here.